Managing the virtual team and controlling effectiveness

Abstract

The design, manufacture and delivery of a product require even-higher levels of expertise and resource. Companies are finding that better internal and external communications can help leverage these resources to better effect; hence, there are initiatives such as simultaneous engineering, knowledge management and team working. These are being supported by ever-increasing expenditure on Information Technology (IT) infrastructures, such as Intranets, Extranets and Enterprise Resource Management systems such as SAP-R3. Virtual Teamworking has been suggested as a new solution, and is the use of IT to support multidisciplinary teamwork between experts separated by distance and time. This paper describes current collaborative practices in the automotive supply chain, and identifies some crucial issues that need to be addressed for successful implementation of virtual teams. Based on these issues identified from a literature survey and from practical trials and observations, an outline methodology for implementing effective virtual teams and managing them successfully is described. Behind the scenes of public declarations of success in adoption lies a struggle to realize significant benefits. Virtual teaming, to implement concurrent engineering, is not specifically addressed in the published literature. This paper focuses on this and uses data and observations from real teams doing real concurrent engineering work in the automotive industry.